Tuesday June 12, 2001 • Howard Tayler

So I argued with myself for a good half hour (spread out over the course of an entire evening--the argument thread got time-sliced in with a bunch of other stuff, including some coloring, and I'm pleased to say THAT thread got me a full 30 days of strips colored and uploaded) over whether or not to do an open letter for today, the one-year anniversary of Schlock Mercenary on the web. Discretion wept in loss as I decided not only to partake in a little self-gratifying back-patting, but also to begin the entire e-pistle with the word "so."

Wow. A year on the web. Or at least it LOOKS that way. I actually started putting the strips on the web in March of 2000, but I only posted a week's worth, and left it that way for months. Then I half-heartedly tried to self-host beginning in early July of 2000, back-dating the "debut" strips to June 12th. When I decided to move to KeenSpace I kept the artificial start-date, and the rest is history. Except for the future bits, of course, although you could argue that eventually EVERYTHING is history, so depending on the tense of the word "is" the statement needs no correction.

English sucks.

It's been a great year. I never could have predicted the level of success I'd see with this little strip of mine, especially since when I started it I had no idea that there were literally THOUSANDS of comic strips online. I got invited to join the KeenSpot club, I've been praised on the Traveller Mailing List, and most flattering of all, I seem to have captured more than a few imaginations in my litle mental playground here. It's like I walked in to what I thought was going to be a small, family party, and found out that it was actually a giant convention, and that I was one of the guests of honor.